Patience!

 

The crazy weather has finally allowed us to do the necessary winter aeration on the greens this week.  We planned on doing it a week ago and had topdressed the greens, however the soil was so frozen we could not get the deep tine to penetrate the ground.  After the rain Sunday and Monday we were able to get out and do all the greens without any damage.  This aeration helps prevent any water sitting on the greens from freezing during flash freeze events.  

10 Completed

 

The 2 fairway bunkers were removed on the right side of 10 and replaced with classical mounding for strategy and aesthetics.  

Making Progress

 

Classical mounding will replace bunkers throughout the golf course.  Here #4 is the first taste of more to come.

Refresh Is Underway!

 2025 will be a busy year at Arcola with the golf course renovation and new irrigation installation beginning in September.  Under the guidance of Andy Staples, our staff is undertaking some projects to help keep the project within budget and to give the members a taste of what Andy is looking to do throughout the course.  This is similar to what we did this past spring with the new tees on 7 and the ditch on 6 fairway.  Andy has identified bunkers we will eliminate and replace with mounding on several holes and below you will see the bunker on 15 is being eliminated and the bunker on 4 is being replaced with "Travis Style" mounds.  These mounds will add some challenge and visual references from the tee.

Club Championship Commitment

 You know we pride ourselves in providing tournament conditions each and every day.  Since aeration in August, it has been a big push to get the greens to perform as they normally do throughout the year.  We needed to get aeration holes to fill, greens to firm up and speeds to return to normal.  While the weather has been near perfect and dry of late, my staff is the key reason the course plays the way it does.  

My staff are often in well before sunrise and gone before most golfers tee off in the morning.  The past two weekends we brought in more staff than normal to ensure the fairways, greens and bunkers were as good as possible. I believe everyone who played will agree that "the greens were back" as they were firm and fast again.  That happens with the help of everyone on my team for weeks and months on end.  A big thank you to them as the 2024 season is now starting to wind down.

Localized Dry Spot

 

You would probably be surprised that the driest area on this fairway is right next to the sprinkler heads on 4 fairway and others.  The reason is when we aerate with the tractor, we lift up around the heads so we do not damage them, often times missing a few feet around each head.  Over time, thatch builds up and water cannot penetrate to the roots.

Here you will see we went out and hand aerified around every fairway head to ensure we can lessen this problem.  Of course next year we will have a new irrigation system and most likely the heads will not be in the same location as they are now so we will be starting all over again in another year or two.

How Long Does Aeration Recovery Really Take?

 Aeration is the most vital thing we do to our turf each year as it has multiple benefits, most of which allow us to provide tournament conditions on a daily basis.  However, the question that is baffling is how long does aeration recovery really take?

Do we base it on not seeing holes on the greens anymore?  In that case, it would probably take up to 6 weeks for full recovery without seeing a single hole.

Firmness is out the window for a few weeks as we have pulled a lot of cores out of the greens and they are quite unstable until they fully knit in.

Do we base it on green speeds?  A big part of it is based on speed and actually not seeing the ball hop on putts, meaning how true and smooth are the greens.

Here is the dilemma when we aerate greens.  From the second we finish cleaning plugs off greens, the focus is to get the holes to fill in as soon as possible.  That means topdressing greens to ensure holes are filled, fertilizing and also watering more frequently.  Weather plays a huge part of recovery, but we can artificially create growth if need be.  The most painful part is the first mowings after aeration.   The sand ruins mowers for a good 7-10 days after we start mowing as we are only picking up sand and not mowing grass due to dull blades.  

Once we start seeing grass in the mower baskets and holes filling in, we start to apply growth regulators since the greens are pretty juiced up with fertilizer.  The growth regulators to some regard will slow the recovery down and sometimes we have to get aggressive with growth regulators due to the amount of water and fertilizers we apply.  Now that recovery is slowing, we apply more nutrients to help speed it up, all the while trying to produce good playing conditions.  It is like running into a wall over and over again.  

The smaller the hole we make on the green, the faster it will heal, but the less we are improving the green.  The idea is once we are given the ok to aerate, lets get the most out of it and punch as many holes and get as much sand into the green profile as possible.  So this year we verticut, aerated and dryjected.  A lot of sand went in the green and a lot of surface disruption.  

  Here is a picture of 15 green today, 22 days after Dryject was completed.  I would say this green is almost healed but lets look closely.  The green lines you see are tire marks that are fractionally lower than the rest of the green.  Once we pull cores the greens are really soft and once we drive equipment over it after (sprayers, topdressers or dryject machines), the tires leave subtle indentations that effect ball roll to some degree.  Not noticeable to the eye but on the stimpmeter it matters.  Regardless of how much we roll, they are still slightly depressed.  The solution;  topdress and brush it in so it levels them out.  That brings us back to square one where the mowers will be affected, the speeds will then be affected and it adds another few days to recovery.  So really, how long does aeration recovery really take?